On Jan. 26, 2022, a former University of British Columbia post-doctoral research fellow led an international research team in re-analyzing all public RNA sequencing data to uncover almost ten times more RNA viruses than were previously known, including several new species of coronaviruses in some unexpected places.

Serratus is a free, open-source cloud-computing infrastructure optimized for petabase-scale sequence alignment against a set of query sequences. Dr. Artem Babaian (he/him) is behind the Serratus Project collaboration. It published the stunning results of the research in the journal Nature.

A supercomputer read through 20 million gigabytes of publicly available gene sequence data from 5.7 million biological samples around the world, searching for a specific gene that indicated the presence of an RNA virus. The samples have been collected and freely shared within the world research community over 13 years and include everything from ice-core samples to animal dung.

Researchers with the Serratus Project found 132,000 RNA viruses (where just 15,000 were known previously) and nine new species of coronaviruses. Babaian estimates that without the CIC and the AWS Cloud, it would take a traditional supercomputer well over a year and hundreds of thousands of dollars to perform the 2,000 years of CPU time necessary for this analysis. Serratus accomplished it in 11 days for $24,000.